Its record, mingling in a breath

The wedding knell and dirge of death;

Jest, anecdote, and love-lorn tale;

The latest culprit sent to jail;

Its hue and cry of stolen and lost,

Its vendue sales and goods at cost,

And traffic calling loud for gain.

We felt the stir of hall and street,

The pulse of life that round us beat;

The chill embargo of the snow

Was melted in the genial glow;

Wide swung again our ice-locked door,

And all the world was ours once more!

Clasp, Angel of the backward look

And folded wings of ashen gray

And voice of echoes far away,

The brazen covers of thy book;

The weird palimpsest old and vast,

Wherein thou hid’st the spectral past;

Where, closely mingling, pale and glow

The characters of joy and woe;

The monographs of outlived years,

Or smile-illumed or dim with tears,

Green hills of life that slope to death,

And haunts of home, whose vistaed trees

Shade off to mournful cypresses

With the white amaranths underneath.

Even while I look, I can but heed

The restless sands’ incessant fall,

Importunate hours that hours succeed,

Each clamorous with its own sharp need,

And duty keeping pace with all.

Shut down and clasp the heavy lids;

I hear again the voice that bids

The dreamer leave his dream midway

For larger hopes and graver fears:

Life greatens in these later years,

The century’s aloe flowers to-day!

Yet, haply, in some lull of life,

Some Truce of God which breaks its strife,

The worldling’s eyes shall gather dew,

Dreaming in throngful city ways

Of winter joys his boyhood knew;

And dear and early friends—the few

Who yet remain—shall pause to view

These Flemish pictures of old days;

Sit with me by the homestead hearth,

And stretch the hands of memory forth

To warm them at the wood-fire’s blaze!

And thanks untraced to lips unknown

Shall greet me like the odors blown

From unseen meadows newly mown,

Or lilies floating in some pond,

Wood-fringed, the wayside gaze beyond;

The traveller owns the grateful sense

Of sweetness near, he knows not whence,

And, pausing, takes with forehead bare

The benediction of the air.

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